Comic Report #124.1 - Follow The Line

I've been pushing myself kinda hard this month attempting to accomplish everything I wanted to get done. A lot of it has been completed, but the comic is still in progress. I think it might end up finishing a little into April, like on this coming Tuesday at the latest, but I'm gonna do what I can to get it done over this weekend.

Speaking of "work that has been completed", we just put the last bit of polish on https://titan.garden, our other new-format narrative project, so you can have a look at that if you didn't see it last week. We added background effects and customizable color palettes, accessed from the Settings menu at the top. There are a few other secrets to find, but I'll leave that to be discovered on its own! We also updated https://luckyraven.cc to point to the new website and not send people to Cohost anymore, so now all of our projects are properly presented in one convenient space.

Since I've crunched myself on time a bit this month I decided to try something I've been thinking about doing with my comic-making process for a little bit. Normally, when I ink, I'll lay down a set of thin lines over my pencils, and then go over the thin lines with thicker outer lines to help define the characters' silhouettes in all the dark greyscale the comic needs to achieve its look. Then, after the outline is established, I use a mid-size brush to strengthen some interior lines to help even it out. This ends up meaning I take three passes to ink each panel in an attempt to make sure my lines and the shapes they define don't get lost in the painting work I'm doing. It's a bit of a pain to do, but this month I burned the candle working on other stuff and I set myself up with a page filled with characters, so I figure, hell, what better time than now to try something new?

I have a bunch of custom Clip Studio brushes I got in a popular pack that I haven't made a lot of use out of, so the other week I went through to try them all and see what I liked. I'd picked out one or two that caught my eye and, for this page, I tried using them to ink in one pass. I figured, if I'm making small lines and building them up into bigger ones in different areas, why not just ink it that way in the first place? A wild thought, I know, but I've had this process built up for a while, you see, there's a lot of momentum. It turns out it saved me a lot of time and, so far, I think it looks about the same, so I cut a bunch of ink passes out of the process to get to the painting without delay.

There's a chance I can get this page finished by the end of this weekend if I really cook on painting all these figures, since the background shouldn't be too difficult, but I'm expecting a Monday or Tuesday update at the latest. I want to go fast but I want to maintain my quality standards. Thanks for your patience on this one, we've wanted to get these other sites up so we can present more than just the one 17-year-old comic to the world, and now we've got something new and fresh to share in addition to maintaining the old standard. I'm gonna get to it, so you should be hearing from me again sooner than later. Until then, have a nice weekend!